[darcs-users] performance (was GHC and Darcs)

[Scott Michel]

On Jul 30, 2008, at 2:48 PM, Max Battcher wrote:

> Ashley Moran wrote:
>> Right now it's hard to get into Haskell - I know because I'm trying.
>> The barrier to entry is high - and if in reality it isn't high, *the
>> Haskell community must make that known*.
>
> It really shouldn't be that high.  If you are having serious problems
> may I recommend taking a pit stop in the land of Lisp or Scheme?

I'm sorry to agree to disagree, since I'm a pretty adequate CL  
hacker. Haskell is easy to read, but like APL, it is almost a write- 
once language. Especially when it comes to hacking out a bit of code  
only to discover that the compiler and interpreter balks over the  
lack of type specificity or required refinement.

Of course, in hindsight, once you get used to the type system's  
strictness, it isn't that bad. But I can't tell you how many of my  
"research days off" (from doing management stuff) I've wasted  
unproductively trying to get Haskell code to correctly compile.

Yes, the barrier to entry is pretty high. And about that "Monad"  
stuff... how many tutorials are necessary to explain what should be  
an easy concept, but in reality, is relatively complex? (No, I'm not  
going to contribute yet another Monad tutorial and I still have to  
remind myself what a Monad is supposed to do and how it supposedly  
works.)

All that said, I did go out of my way to make sure that Haskell has  
representation at the Supercomputing '08 "Bridging The  
Programmability Gap" workshop, since I personally think it has some  
good contributions to make in the area of programming symmetric and  
hybrid multicore.


-scooter